In "The Dolliver Romance," only three chapters of which the author lived
to complete, we get an intimation as to what would have been the ultimate
form given to that romance founded on the Elixir of Life, for which
"Septimius Felton" was the preliminary study. Having abandoned this study,
and apparently forsaken the whole scheme in 1862, Hawthorne was moved to
renew his meditation upon it in the following year; and as the plan of the
romance had now seemingly developed to his satisfaction, he listened to
the publisher's proposal that it should begin its course as a serial story
in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864 the first instance in which
he had attempted such a mode of publication.

But the change from England to Massachusetts had been marked by, and had
perhaps in part caused, a decline in his health. Illness in his family,
the depressing and harrowing effect of the Civil War upon his
sensibilities, and anxiety with regard to pecuniary affairs, all combined
to make still further inroads upon his vitality; and so early as the
autumn of 1862 Mrs. Hawthorne noted in her private diary that her husband
was looking "miserably ill." At no time since boyhood had he suffered any
serious sickness, and his strong constitution enabled him to rally from
this first attack; but the gradual decline continued. After sending forth
"Our Old Home," he had little strength for any employment more arduous
than reading, or than walking his accustomed path among the pines and
sweetfern on the hill behind The Wayside, known to his family as the Mount
of Vision. The projected work, therefore, advanced but slowly. He wrote to
Mr. Fields:

"I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the
Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters
ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel
as if I should never carry it through."

The presentiment proved to be only too well founded. He had previously
written:

"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be
encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a
sunshiny book."

And again, in November, he says: "I foresee that there is little
probability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, although I
have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month." He did
indeed send it by that time, but it began to be apparent in January that
he could not go on.

"Seriously," he says, in one letter, "my mind has, for the present, lost
its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better
keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor if I wait quietly
for it; perhaps not." In another: "I hardly know what to say to the public
about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will
be. I shall never finish it.... I cannot finish it unless a great change
comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my
death."

Finally, work had to be given over indefinitely. In April he went
southward with Mr. Ticknor, the senior partner of his publishing house;
but Mr. Ticknor died suddenly in Philadelphia, and Hawthorne returned to
The Wayside more feeble than ever. He lingered there a little while. Then,
early in May, came the last effort to recover tone, by means of a
carriage journey, with his friend Ex President Pierce, through the
southern part of New Hampshire. A week passed, and all was ended: at the
hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he and his companion had stopped
to rest, he died in the night, between the 18th and the 19th of May, 1864.
Like Thackeray and Dickens, he was touched by death's "petrific mace"
before he had had time to do more than lay the groundwork and begin the
main structure of the fiction he had in hand; and, as in the case of
Thackeray, the suddenness of his decease has never been clearly accounted
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